must love the highest when we see or hear it. Intellectual companionship is a primal necessity in the home contacts. Partially because of the craze for visible and audible entertainment, we have lost the habit of reading. Why trouble to plough for ten or twelve hours through a volume when one may look upon its contents picturized within the duration of an evening's performance at the theatre and in addition the "evil of solitariness" be avoided?

There is a real advantage in the old-time habit of reading aloud in the home. It is one conducive to community of interest and a heightened tone of home-contacts. It is far better to make dinner or library conversation revolve around worth-while books than worthless persons. It may not be easy for some parents to acquire or achieve this home habit of reading aloud but it is of the highest importance that children be enabled to respect their parents as thinking and cultivated persons if these they can become. One cannot help regretting that reading aloud is becoming a lost art. One hardly knows how badly reading aloud can be done and how wretchedly it is for the most part taught until one asks one's children to read aloud.

The choice and the art of reading can best be stimulated and guided within the intimacy of the home. It may, as I have said, be difficult for parents, especially fathers, to accustom themselves to the practice of reading aloud. It may seem sternly and cruelly taskful to read to and with one's children when it is so much pleasanter to exercise one's mind at bridge whist with contemporaries or to yield to the pleasurable anodyne of the "movies." And yet I do not know of a truer service that parents can render children than to foster a taste for worth-while books, for the best that has been said and sung, if one may so paraphrase, so that these may know and love the great things in prose and poetry alike. It is never too late to begin the habit of reading any more than adults ever find it too late to learn to dance or to play bridge.

Alice Freeman Palmer has put it [C]: "You will want your daughter to feel that you were a student, too, when she becomes one, and that the learning is never done as long as we are in God's wonderful world." What a difference it will make when all mothers have such relations with their children beside the life of love. When I say that it is for you to live with your children, I do not mean that you are to go to the theatre with them daily or thrice weekly, for that is merely sharing pastimes with them. I say live with them, not merely join them in their amusements. Not only is reading good and needful but the right kind of reading. I sometimes wonder as I look upon cultivated persons handing their adolescent children sheaves of magazines, cheap, vulgar, nasty. We cannot expect that our children can for years feed upon the trivial and ephemeral and then give themselves to things big and worth-while.

In one of his stimulating volumes, [D] Frederic Harrison suggests that men who are most observant as to the friends they make or the conversation they share are carelessness itself as to the books to which they entrust themselves and the printed language with which they saturate their minds. Are not parents often carelessness itself with respect to the books to which even very young children are suffered to entrust themselves? A book's not a book! Some books are vacant, some are deadening, some are pestilential. Wisely to help children to the right choice of books, remembering that reading is to be of widest range and that in reading there are innumerable aptitudes, is to render one of the most important of services to a child.

The editor of a woman's magazine recently pointed out that in one year nine thousand eight hundred and forty-six girls wrote to her about beauty problems, and seventeen hundred and seventy-six asked advice with respect to other problems, "the throbbing, vital questions that beset the social and business life of the modern girl." Out of what kind of homes have come these young women, whose quest is of complexion-wafers? The figures of the magazine editor are above all things a testimonium paupertatis, intellectual and spiritual, to multitudes of American homes. What kind of mothers will these young women make? Do they dream of rearing fine sons and noble daughters, or will they be satisfied to become child-bearers at best rather than builders of men and women? But there is something more, and it is more closely related to our particular problem. It is from the empty, poor, however rich, homes that bitter protest and heartbreaking revolt will emerge. For some children are bound in the end to despise the cramping intellectual and moral poverty of their childhood homes,—whence conflict takes its rise.

CHAPTER IV

THE ART OF PARENTAL GIVING

Parents must be made to see that the really irrepressible conflicts are not begun when children are fourteen, sixteen and eighteen but rather four, six, eight; in other words, are ascribable to causes long anterior to the occasions which disclose their unavoidableness. Thus parents may find themselves in collision with maturing children over the utterly sordid and gleamless character of their lives, or, what is not less grave in its consequences, their "visionary and impractical ways, so different from our well-tried modus vivendi." It is quite safe to predict the rise of conflict of one character or another when parents are unmindful of the higher responsibilities of their vocation, the responsibility of making clear to children the reality of moral and spiritual values.

The supreme parental responsibility is to give or to help children to achieve for themselves those standards by which alone men truly live, to give to children the impulse that shall reveal not what they may live by but what they ought to live for. The one potent way to avoid future conflict is so to make for, not point to, a goal that children shall not become mere money-grubbers or perpetuators of ancient prejudices or maintainers of false values or lawless upholders of the law.

Parents would do well to have in mind that the most just and terrible of reproaches are often left unspoken. I am thinking of a youth who had inherited a very large fortune. Happening to point out to him to what uses his means might be put, this youth replied: "My parents never ceased to tell me what not to do, but they never told me what it is that I ought to do. There are no oughts in my life which I have gotten from my father. I have learned what I ought not to do and I suppose that I know that." This was the young heir's revolt and, if his word be true, wholly just revolt against the spirit of those parents who seem to imagine it to be enough if they teach their children such fundamentals as the perils of violating statutory law, the inexpediency of coming into conflict with those ordinances which it is the part of convention never to violate.

In one word, it is not enough to forbid and interdict. Obedience to don'ts, however multitudinous, is not even the beginning of morality though it lead to a certain degree of personal security. Forbidding